The Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi's enduring kutub khana and literary legacy

The Sunday Book Bazaar: Daryaganj and the Making of a Reading Public in Delhi

by Kanupriya Dhingra

Published by Speaking Tiger

311 pages  ₹599

 

Scholar of book history and print cultures, Kanupriya Dhingra’s debut book examines Daryaganj’s parallel book culture. Dr Dhingra’s doctoral research at SOAS University of London, supported by the Felix Scholarship, it was first published in 2024, as Old Delhi’s Parallel Book Bazaar, a short-form academic monograph by Cambridge University Press Element.

 

One of Delhi’s most beloved cultural institutions, the Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar has for decades drawn students, collectors, families and tourists to its pavement. The books it inhabits are a mix of school textbooks, competitive-exam materials, old paperbacks, pirated editions, comics, classics, storybooks, bestsellers, magazines, coffee-table books self-help books and rare editions.

 

“Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar has survived municipal raids, court orders, evictions, relocations, and sixty years of official indifference,” Dr Dhingra writes in the Prologue. She arrived at the bazaar as a researcher and became an accidental shauqeen buyer, who began returning regularly. Through extensive interviews with booksellers and readers over time, Dr Dhingra put together what reads like a detailed and well-researched biography of a bazaar, tracing the history and evolution of an important historic landmark of the capital.

 

Interestingly, the neighbourhood’s book culture is as old as its commerce, Dr Dhingra points out. Urdu Bazaar was one of Shahjahanabad’s principal literary arteries, and  kutub khanas lined the streets in the late Mughal and early colonial period. Post Partition, many major publishers, such as Hind Pocket Books, Vani Prakashan, Rajkamal Prakashan, Prakash Prakashan, Motilal Banarsidass, Diamond Books, S Chand & Co, and later, Oxford University Press, set up around the area. “By the late twentieth century, Daryaganj had become the symbolic heart of India’s publishing geography,” she writes.

 

By the 1970s, the Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar had become one of the most recognised second-hand book markets in the country. Thereafter, it was legalised as a ‘specialised’ bazaar for books, and later formally designated a ‘natural market’ by the New Delhi Municipal

 

Corporation. Over the course of multiple visits to the Sunday book market, Dhingra found that walking is not just a means of experiencing it, it is a vital part of the fabric of Old Delhi itself.  

 

Over a period of time, vendors expanded their inventory to include an assortment of second-hand goods sourced from the US, the UK and Australia. Despite the market’s apparent chaos, Dr Dhingra discovered that there is a strategic method to the madness in the way books are displayed at the bazaar. The chaos, she found, is partly managed by the vendors, whose apparently haphazard arrangements are deliberate. “Desire is awakened not through immediate recognition but through accident, intuition and sudden nostalgia,” she explains.

 

In July 2019, the author got a call telling her that after six decades of its existence, the bazaar had been lifted, citing ‘traffic concerns’. “For nearly 300 vendors, a Sunday without the bazaar was not merely an inconvenience — it was a week’s income gone,” she writes. Many had no alternative sources of livelihood. The announcement was followed by protests both onsite as well as in the form of press articles and social media hashtags. Community artists, architects, local residents and student groups joined the campaign along with representatives from the National Hawkers Federation and other informal workers’ unions. In September 2019, the Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar was relocated to Mahila Haat, a pivotal moment in Delhi’s literary geography.

 

The bazaar has been one of the ways to experience the city and its ever-changing physiognomy. Dr Dhingra tell us that notable shauqeen visitors over the years include author Khushwant Singh, historian Ramachandra Guha, oral historian Sohail Hashmi and blogger Mayank Austen Soofi. Among other things, the market also provides bookshelves for several film sets as well as builds libraries in various cities. According to Dr Dhingra, the vendors’ stories, their struggles and their triumphs are integral to the market’s identity. “Book buyers, in fact, are the understated, creative ethnographers of the space of this bazaar,” she adds.  

 

While a fitting tribute to an important cultural landmark in the city, the book is an interesting story of how a weekly footpath market transformed into a permanent feature of the city’s cultural geography. In the pre-Internet days, books were an important resource for both information as well as entertainment. The Sunday Book Bazaar evokes nostalgia for an entire generation of Dilliwallahs who have been shaped in some way by memories of browsing through and shopping at the bazaar. “It is a place that teaches you what you want by putting it in your hands before you’ve thought to ask for it,” the writer concludes.

 

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The reviewer is a New Delhi-based freelance writer